Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War

by Correlli Barnett

A study of the Royal Navy's operations and strategy throughout World War II

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Military History, Military Fiction, British Literature, Naval History, World War II

1052 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

A freelance historian and writer, Correlli Barnett was educated at Trinity school and Exeter College, Oxford, where he took a degree in modern history. After national service in the Intelligence Corps from 1945 to 1948, Barnett worked for the North Thames Gas Board until 1957, then in public relations until 1963. He was historical consultant and part author of the BBC series 'The Great War' and won the 1964 Screen Writers' Guild Award for best British television documentary script.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Corelli Barnett is a polemicist about British decline as much as he is an historian. Sometimes his rhetoric could go a little 'over the top' but he made a good case. He saw a British elite behaving as if the UK was as great a Power in the middle of the twentieth century as it had been in the nineteenth.

Nevertheless, his powers as a historian always kept him well within the bounds of reality. The facts dictated the story. In that context, this book (published in 1991) has multiple virtues as both corrective to received ideas and as a chronological narrative.

It is a weighty tome. Barnett is not shy of offering precise details of ship movements and tonnages but, if you slide over these as you are so inclined, you will get both a sound strategic overview of British naval power in the Second World War and some very exciting stories.

Let us take the second first. He takes us to the heart of the naval achievement under the heroic organiser Admiral Ramsay in abstracting thousands of defeated troops from the shore at Dunkirk in 1940.

Then there is Cunningham's achievement at the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941 which defeated the Italian Grand Fleet in the type of sea battle that might have been a throw-back to the great age of Nelson. It was indeed the last British naval fleet action.

Barnett also takes us deep into the only naval battle that was truly existential to the British - that for the Atlantic which Admiral Donitz nearly won. He explains its importance and why it was such a 'close-run thing'. Donitz was still capable of re-starting the Battle with new and superior submarine resources very late in the war as Germany itself was falling to land armies. Hitler made Donitz his successor for a reason and one of them is that he did not let him down.

There are accounts of the Arctic Convoys, the to-ing and fro-ing across the Mediterranean as the British attempted to hold their lifeline to their Asian Empire, many sea-to-land operations and, of course, the massively important contribution of the Royal Navy [Operation Neptune] to Operation Overlord, once again under Admiral Ramsay.

History has perhaps neglected men like Ramsay and Cunningham because the naval struggle in these years was essentially defensive. The actual defeat of the enemy was a matter of air raids, land forces and the island-hopping of US Admiral King and US General Macarthur but these Britons were the equals of Nelson and should be honoured as such.

Barnett's title gives you a flavour of the book. The spirit of close engagement is Nelsonian and requires an attitude to calculated risk-taking and sheer courage that really did seem to give the British an edge. It was a cultural stance as much as anything else. This is no patriotic puff piece, however. It makes the important point that the Royal Navy was technically a flawed operation, over extended and under resourced, albeit led into battle by these (mostly) remarkably brave and intelligent commanders supported by exceptional men.

The weaknesses of the Navy owed a lot to complacencies and conservatism engendered within an Empire on which the sun never set but which were also budgetary. national-economic and political - matters almost entirely out of the hands of the Admiralty although conservative attitudes in the Navy before 1939 were as costly to success initially as Anglo-French pre-war military doctrine.

The strategic story is as interesting as the tactical heroics. It is one, in summary, of utter shock at the scale and speed of collapse in the East, followed by an existential crisis in which the Navy's main role is keeping supply lines open and enabling invasions. Eventually, it becomes the story of the rather too-obvious replacement within a very few years of British naval superiority with that of the United States.

The underlying problem was economic - the British Empire was not merely over-extended and complacent but it had been exhausted by the First World War. Barnett's polemical point here and elsewhere is that the homeland economy was inefficient and plagued by truly decadent class attitudes that mitigated heavily against improved production and technological effectiveness.

I remain persuaded that the British Empire was never not going to survive the war in some form - its historic trading links and scale gave it the luxury of a certain inertia - but time and time again we see superior innovation or ability to scale up production in both Germany and the US. This alone leads to US displacement of the British Empire. One might be grateful that the Presidency was held by an anglophiliac East Coaster and not someone with the views of Admiral King or Joe Kennedy.

The book adds insights into the process by which that displacement took place. Its smoothness and inherent logic remains one of the most remarkable examples of imperial hand-over in history even if some of the British military establishment tried to equalise the relationship as they went along.

What is very interesting is the way that the Navy became the leading edge of Anglo-American co-operation, striking up practical working relationships with the American Navy that might be said to be at the very core of post-war political Atlanticism.

The Australians and New Zealanders had effectively been abandoned after the Fall of Singapore and had turned to US leadership for protection. They were not let down by Washington and they remain part of the US sphere of influence today, fully integrated into the Big Five of which the UK is only one part. Indeed, on a map of the Big Five, the UK looks decidedly odd - like an island colony, a massive Hong Kong for two faraway Continents.

The Battle of the Atlantic had certainly demanded close Anglo-American naval co-operation. This developed in response to events rapidly. Once it was decided that Germany must be brought to heel, the UK became the absolutely necessary launch pad for a military schwerpunkt. That meant that the British people had to survive much as the Arctic Convoys sent a signal that the Soviet Army had to keep driving forward.

From this perspective, the U-Boat War was perhaps not only the most dangerous existential threat to the British people since the Norman invasion but a threat not so much of German dominance of Europe as, as things started to turn out by 1944, Soviet dominance.

A UK starved into submission was not likely so much as a grinding down of the Western ability to conduct war at all except costly attrition in France and the Netherlands or on the Rhine. The Western Allies could only watch as the Red Army rolled up the Germans from behind and an interesting counter-factual is what Nagasaki and Hiroshima might have meant as threats within Europe in that eventuality.

Whatever the concerns, the North Atlantic needed to be kept open first to feed the British people and to maintain its productive capacity and then to ensure the safe arrival of hundreds of thousands of men and associated hardware from North America.

As for the Pacific theatre, this scarcely existed for the British Navy after Singapore. A somewhat pathetic defensive naval presence in the Indian Ocean held a certain line while Admiral King, an anglophobic exception to the Atlantic orientation of the rest of Washington, moved forward, clearly not wanting British offers of help.

The lack of interest in British help was not just political (to stop the British claiming a larger role than they should have had in the defeat of Japan) but technical. Brave British naval warriors could not keep up with the administrative and logistical efficiencies of their US counterparts. They might even have been regarded, at times, as a potential drag on American progress. It could be said that the US in 1944 did not need the British in the Pacific any more than the Russians needed the Western Allies in 1945.

The main contribution of the British was to have kept on fighting for two or three years, slowing down enemies until the two major post-War Powers could come into play and get organised for battle. If Hitler had not attacked Russia and Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbour, the British Empire might not have been defeated but it would have had to come to some sort of terms with a Continental Power, even if those terms were simply a 'Cold War' acceptance of mutual resentful existence or a Napoleonic blockade punctuated by massive air raids.

The Navy played an absolutely critical role in those crucial years, maintaining sufficient though not total command of the North Atlantic (albeit wasting resources often on sustaining a busted Empire elsewhere) and enabling amphibious operations of ever-increasing efficiency and effectiveness.

One of the stories of note in this book is that of the development of invasion tactics. If you only have to read three chapters of this work, read those on the remarkable achievement of Ramsay during Operation Neptune - the organisation getting men and material across to Europe was very much a British naval business and brilliantly organised.

The Royal Navy, as much as Air Defence, saved the island yet it also permitted the wastefulnesses of Churchill's peculiar hobby-horses and the noble, heroic but economically distracting pretence that a global empire could be held permanently. Today, the Royal Navy has been busted down to an anti-submarine operation and home defence with a rather expensive (for its value to the British people) support operation for political adventures directed at protecting islands filled with sheep and sustaining Blairite 'humanitarian' operations to keep liberal voters happy.

Liberal voters were a problem in the past too and a sort of dead weight on interwar naval history. The well-meaning Liberal Pacifism of the inter war years is fingered by Barnett as a major contributing factor to naval operational weakness. Democracy is not good for security, it would seem.

The Royal Navy will never again 'rule the waves' but it remains a vital island defence force, more useful in its seamanship than in its capacity to send death-dealing mega-war crime nuclear missiles to slaughter millions. More today than ever, the British population is vulnerable to the closure of sea-lines - our overcrowded little island could probably never have survived the Battle of the Atlantic at its current population density.

The Anglo-American relationship is thus mutual when it comes to command of the North Atlantic and it can survive on that basis. One can only regret that recent Prime Ministers continue to think that this relationship, designed to command just half an ocean, now has to include expensive bloody adventurisms in old imperial territories to keep it alive. It probably doesn't.

It is as if cunning policy-makers in Washington and old elites in London who still talk the talk of hegemony conspire to spread us far too thinly once again and to undertake actions that bring our former subjects into a direct confrontational relationship with us that none of us need.

This situation has arisen a quarter of a century after Barnett's book but one wonders if anything has been learned here about over-stretch and concentration of effort - but that is another story for another day. What this book does is bring us down to earth both on the material basis for any exercise of power and the added edge given to someone weaker than they think they are by the morale factor.

Because the British did not believe they were in decline, they acted as if they were not. This was ultimately wasteful and economically disastrous but it did contribute to the winning of an existential struggle which is where it counts - a sort of political adrenaline rush.

The trouble is that using that extra effort to win a sprint is one thing, winning a marathon is another. Barnett's book tells us about a nation that can be a great sprinter but is losing the marathon because it won't change its technique. He simply saw this happening at half-way stage. We are standing nearer the finishing line. Or to use another analogy. Adrenaline rushes are sometimes vital for survival, triggering fight or flight, but a body that is constantly in a state of stress will get ill and may die earlier than it needs to.

Highly recommended with good photos, maps, notes, glossary and index.

[Paul Tisserant · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second time I've read this superb book. Full of information but still very readable. If you want to know more about the RN in WWII, then make a point of reading this book. Definitive!

[Philip Healey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best single volume history of the Royal Navy in the Second World War.

The author takes a consistently view of British performance, in line with his earlier writing, but he marshals a great deal of evidence in his opinion.

It would be worth pairing the book with more detailed and recent histories. For instance Marc Milners 'Battle of the Atlantic' is able to evidence the huge damage that the Bay of Biscay bombing campaign did to the logistics and organisation of the Uboat war, whereas Correlli Barnett simply reviews the number of boats sunk.

[Tdr85 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant work. The author infuses this tome with his own sharply worded views that are backed up by a wealth of scholarship. He is hard on Churchill. A long read but it was never dry and I learned a lot.